SOFTSWISS Founder: Tech No Longer Wins the Race, Decisions Do

Speed of execution beats access to technology. That's the claim Ivan Montik, founder of SOFTSWISS, put to a packed hall at the first Tech Race Summit in Warsaw last week. He framed it as a correction to how the industry thinks, not a slogan.

"The real tech race is not won solely by technology anymore," he said. "It is won by the speed of execution and decision-making."

Montik has founded or co-founded four companies over roughly twenty years, and he pins the shift to a precise point. Back in 2009, when SOFTSWISS launched, proprietary tech was a real edge. Not anymore. Capable AI tools now sit within reach of just about any operator, and that edge has flattened out. What limits you isn't what you can build. It's how fast you can get it out the door. "Today, without fast decisions, you can't do business anymore," he added.

So the window for acting has narrowed. Let a rival put the same off-the-shelf tools to better use, and your market share can bleed away before you've finished the meeting about it. Montik's instruction to the room was blunt: decide today, not next week. Some of those calls will flop. In his reading, the worse outcome is standing still while a competitor pulls off the same move. "Technology alone doesn't create value anymore," he said. "Decisions do."

Speed has to be built into the structure, he argues, not just aspired to. For a business with hundreds or thousands of staff, that means splitting the management chain into tight groups of ten or fewer, each with clear decision rights. Information moves down more cleanly that way, and nobody has to push a request through five layers of approval before they can act. SOFTSWISS has run the model on its own AI rollout. The company found tools were in use across teams with no structure in place to confirm they were delivering what was intended. So it split oversight into two verticals: the Chief Technology Officer took security and innovation, while a newly created Chief AI Officer handled integration across every team. Twelve months on, each team has an AI-adept member whose job is spotting where new tools fit its own workflows and lift performance against team KPIs. SOFTSWISS reports a clearer adoption structure and less waste.

Then Montik applied the brakes. Security, he said, is the one thing you can't trade for pace, and he has the balance sheet to prove it. CoinsPaid, the blockchain payment infrastructure business he helped co-found, got hit by the Lazarus Group, the North Korean cybercrime syndicate, on a Friday afternoon. The loss came to $37.3m. What followed were sleepless nights and a rebuilt philosophy the company calls security by design, with security moved to the front of decision-making across technology and HR alike. Lazarus tried again years later. By then the defences had been overhauled. "My advice to you is to never sacrifice resilience for fast growth," Montik said. "Believe me."

For operators, the arithmetic is uncomfortable but simple. AI is a commodity input now, so it can't be the differentiator it once was, and the same tools that speed up a product roadmap also speed up the people probing it. Montik's answer is organisational: small decision-making units, a named owner for AI in every team, and security baked into the process rather than bolted on after an incident. The $37.3m figure is the number that lingers. It's the one worth holding next to any growth target. What the market will watch from here is whether operators actually restructure around decision speed, or keep buying tools and calling it strategy.